It’s holiday time! My gift today is the story of a recent decision. You may want to try it. It’s made life a bit more effortful, but it’s produced real results. It has paid off in both expected and unexpected ways.

Whoa! I quit Facebook.

I quit Facebook. Yeah, it’s made a big difference, but not in the ways you’d think. Here are some not-so-obvious reasons why.

I’d long felt that Facebook wasn’t a particularly ethical company, and have used it with great ambivalence. Even apart from my moral doubts, I’d gone on holiday with no Facebook access. I returned centered, rested, and stable. Turning on Facebook jolted my addiction centers so noticeably that I could watch myself sliding into anxiety, distraction, and confusion.

But even with its bad effects starkly highlighted, I stayed online. Why? The same reason we all do: many social events are now advertised only on Facebook. And it’s one of the only ways I stay in touch with many of my friends.

But then last month, the New York Times investigative journalists exposed wrong-doing, coverups, and lies coming from Facebook’s top management. Morally, I just couldn’t continue to support the platform. Every post and comment is giving Facebook content to use to hook my friends and family.

So took a deep breath and committed to pulling the plug. I’ve been keeping careful track of what’s happened since then. It’s been surprising what’s happened. Social media was controlling my life in ways I’d never imagined until leaving.

Dropping social media makes you a better person

I used to see lots of stuff on social media about how to be smarter. Ironic, since social media itself probably dumbed me down by 20 IQ points.

Now, I’m thinking better. Social media fragments thoughts. It encourages thinking 140-280 characters at a time. But we’re smarter than that! Unless we train ourselves to be dumb

"Scientists discover real space aliens!" is a shareable headline that might appear on Facebook. But it makes us stupid. The intelligent reality—that we’ve found molecules that are the precursor to life—won’t generate shares.

Without social media, I’m regaining the ability to read long-form articles and think smart.

Interpersonal stuff gets way better!

Conversations are better. Social media makes conversation brief and scattered. Online conversations take a long time and seem extensive. But usually, they aren’t. Try reading one out loud, as if it were a script. You’ll find most "long" social media threads are just a few minutes of speech. They took a long time because typing and reading are slower than talking. And with a dozen people chiming in, actual interaction between you and any one person is minimal. It’s not real conversation.

Two board members of a non-profit I’m part of had a big fight on social media. The whole community jumped in. Accusations! Insults! Calls for resignation! It went on for weeks and almost destroyed the annual 4,000-person event. But it was actually only 20-30 paragraphs of interaction. It could have been resolved more quickly, more peacefully, with a single evening’s in-person meeting.

Without social media, I’m choosing my battles more wisely. I’m considering what I want to say before opening my mouth. Conversation is higher quality. It lasts longer and a lot gets said. It’s pretty awesome!

Less social media, means better social-izing!

My fears about losing my social life? They’re real, sort-of. Now, it takes effort. I need to make a conscious choice: who do I want to spend time with? Then I need to reach out and make sure we connect.

On Facebook, posts come pictures of friends. That’s a reminder to reach out to whoever social media happens to put in our path. There’s no reason to think that the people in our timeline are the people we’d most like in our close circle. They’re simply … the people who end up in our timeline.

Since quitting social media, it takes work to keep a friend. This is a good thing! I need to be deliberate about who I reach out to. I need to work to reach out to them. But perhaps that’s good. Because who your friends are, matters. Good friends take investment of time and energy. You want friends who enrich your life.

If it’s not worth the effort to connect with someone, that’s a message: maybe they’re not valuable enough to take up time in my life. Harsh, but true.

I get to be me, a meeple, not a compliant sheeple

I never realized how much my timeline directs my attention. A dozen great articles appear daily. Genuinely great. High-quality. I read them. But … they don’t add up to anything. They feel useful because they’re interesting, but they’re scattered. They’re all over the place. Rather than reading about a few topics deliberately, and getting deep learning, I’m just stimulating my brain’s reward centers with the feeling that just because an article is good, I’m better for having read it.

Deliberate or not, social media shapes our beliefs and attitudes through what it shows us. And its algorithms are tuned towards getting us emotional enough to click a link. They aren’t tuned towards getting us to be better, clearer people along any dimension whatsoever. Think about that.

Now, I’m deciding what I want to be educated about and seeking out the high-quality articles on those topics.

On Facebook, my social group, my attention, and my learning all happen by reacting to whatever the algorithm throws in my face. Off Facebook, my social group, my attention, and my learning all happen because I make them happen.

Yes, it’s more effort. That’s the cost. But the benefit: control and direction of who I am and who I’m becoming.

Regain control of who you are in the world

How about you? Try a Facebook holiday for a month. Make it long enough so you reinstate your offline systems. You’ll figure out how to keep in touch with people. You’ll find ways to stay informed.

And ultimately, you’ll be building a life where you get to hang out with the people you want, learn the things you want, and become the person you want to be. Do you really want social media deciding who you’ll become?

As we saw in part 1, and part 2, we often we get stalled because we have "microfears." These steer us away from the Important Things we want. It’s our thinking that does it. We imagine what might go wrong, feel a bit of fear, and then suddenly notice we have a pressing urge to watch Netflix.

The good part is that we’ve noticed how things might go wrong. The bad part is that we’ve responded by avoiding, not by taking care of what might go wrong.

Where are you stalled?

What’s not getting done?

Where do you shy away?

It’s easy to find fears; just ask!

Stop right now and think of where you’re stalled. Now just ask yourself:

What am I afraid of?

Give as many answers as come to mind. Then give one or two more. You’ll often find the answers spring to mind quickly.

Use your brain, deliberately

Remember: your brain is not logical. List the answers, no matter how realistic they may be.

Imagine you’re afraid to say "No" when your boss asks you to work weekends. You might have a sort-of-reasonable fear like "I’m afraid I’ll get fired if I say No." You might also have over-the-top fears. "I’m afraid I’ll die alone in a gutter, covered in mud, smelling of bad whisky."

Both are triggering your fear response, so you need to deal with both of them.

Separate emotion and information

Now bring in your Thinking Brain to address your imagined futures. For each one, mentally make a plan for how you can prevent the fear from happening, and how you can address it if it does happen.

I’m afraid I’ll get fired. I ask my boss ahead of time, "what will happen if I say ‘no’?" I can also keep up-to-date on my networking so if it does happen, I have a fallback plan.

I’m afraid I’ll die alone in a gutter. I’ll look at my bank balance and credit limits to be sure I can get enough money to keep my apartment if I get fired.

Now implement those plans.

Congratulations! You’ve handled a microfear. You heard the messages your brain was concerned about. Rather than falling into fight/flight/freeze, you made a concrete plan. The next move is up to you, not your fear.

We’re afraid of choosing the wrong job and missing a better opportunity.

Ash realized that their business partner was no longer a good fit for the business. But they were scared to have the difficult conversation, because it might destroy the relationship.

Look carefully. All those fears are about something that isn’t happening in front of you. Every one.

Fear began as a way to save us from danger that was present and immediate. We’d spot a Saber Tooth tiger or killer jellyfish and get afraid. Very afraid. And we’d run, or fight, or freeze. As long as we chose the right one for the occasion, those reactions served us well.

Our brain still has that reaction, however, even to our own imagination. We run a mental movie of our business partner getting upset during a conversation. Then we get afraid that they really are upset. But we’re really just projecting what we think will happen. Then we get scared of our mental movie and decide we won’t have that difficult conversation.

If you aren’t making progress on Something Important, blame fear. The fear comes from your beliefs and thoughts about the future.

Fear = perceived danger + emotion

Yay, Brain!! We can anticipate problems and respond in advance.

This is a good thing!

What sucks is the fight/flight/freeze response. It helps us survive a killer jellyfish, but not much else. And it certainly doesn’t help us have a difficult conversation when we need to.

When you anticipate a problem, however, you have plenty of time to be smart about it. If you can defuse fight/flight/freeze while still knowing the problem, you can use your smarts to deal with it.

Without fight/flight/freeze: Ash imagines the business partner freaking out and … calmly calmly and carefully rehearses the conversation. Ash tries several presentations, choosing the most respectful, gentle approach. (In the real case, the partner knew he wasn’t a fit. He was relieved to discuss it and left amicably.)

Without fight/flight/freeze, you can take deliberate action. You can plan. You can take action to choose your future. You don’t have to let your emotions choose your actions:

You imagine failing at something you want to learn … and you calmly identify tutors, extra reading, and other resources in advance to help.

You’re afraid you might fail at an ambitious project … and you recruit a team with the needed skills. You do good risk management up front, making success much more likely.

You believe you might choose the wrong job … and you make a plan. You keep in touch with your other prospects so you have a backup network.

Make your fears work for you

Your brain is great at projecting What Might Happen. You have plenty of time to plan. But when your fear hijacks your thinking, you end up avoiding the very things you want to do.

Where are you stalled?

What’s not getting done?

Where do you shy away?

In part 3, I’ll share some tips for finding and overcoming your fears.

There’s a lot that doesn’t get done, despite our best laid plans. There’s that novel we’ve dreamed about writing. The weekly billing, which always seems to be late. The networking and prospecting we need to keep our business running.

Early in my career, I learned about human motivation from my mentor, Joe Yeager. He had a simple, but surprisingly profound, model of achievement. To get what you want, you must:

Want to do it

Know How to get it

Have the chance to pursue it

It’s the “Want to, How to, Chance to” model. It applies to organizations that aren’t finishing important initiatives, as well as people. Give it a shot.

What’s something that isn’t getting done in your life or business? Is the problem you don’t want it to get done, you don’t know how to do it, or you don’t have the chance to do it?

If you’re stalled, check your “Want to”

Here’s a secret: if you’re stuck, it’s almost always because of your “want to.” When you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way to learn how, and you’ll find a way to make the chance.

But even if you’re a high-achiever, even if you have complete mastery in your life, your “want to” can sabotage you every time.

Why? Because “want to” is all emotion. Emotion is powerful. Emotion is irrational. Emotion comes from the hindbrain and can override your logic and common sense. And your emotions can contradict your conscious desires and make you flame out.

Emotion drives excuses

When we somehow aren’t taking action, we have reasons. Indeed, the smarter we are, the more plausible the excuses. But dig deeper. Beneath the excuses is emotion:

It’s OK if my business partner doesn’t fit into the business any more. He can be a good will ambassador. (Truth: I’m avoiding a hard conversation.)

Once the kids leave home, then I’ll lose weight. (Truth: I’ve always been big. If I lose weight, who am I? I don’t know how to be thin.)

Fear kills “want to”

Notice a pattern? The emotion behind our excuses is almost always fear. Not big, traumatic fear. Tiny, lurking fear. I call these “microfears.”

… the fear of failure

… the fear of hurting a friend

… the fear of being someone new

Fear triggers our fight/flight/freeze response. So it hijacks our ability to do the things we know we need to do.

Little fears make us avoid

The things we stall, we stall from fear. Why will the mail pile never get sorted?

… because we’re afraid of confronting those bank statements that need to be reconciled
… because we’re afraid the itemized credit card bill will force us to confront the real cost of our six-week volcano-chasing holiday
… because we’ll out that we’re about to be audited (if you never see the notice, it didn’t happen, right? Sadly, no. The tax authorities the tax authorities show up in person at 7 am. True story.)

Fears are findable!

Over my years as a coach, I’ve discovered that:

you can identify the fears that are driving (or not driving) you

there are techniques that are consistently effective at breaking through fear and getting you moving

That adage is usually used to discuss how people are paid. If you pay a bonus based on quarterly results, some people will manipulate the timing of sales to generate low-quality sales so they can get a bonus.

Broader economic measures have a tremendous effect, too. When the political party in power cries, “The economy is doing well/poorly,” they usually are referring to a very, very narrow set of financial measures. Generally “the stock market,” which translates into the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or the S&P 500, or aggregate corporate profits of public companies. Economic news virtually never includes any measure of well-being of individuals, so it’s not too surprising that an economic-indicator-based measurement system will give the well-being of companies a lot of weight.

GE was just booted from the DJIA

I’m genuinely puzzled. GE has been removed from the Dow Jones. This matters because inclusion in an index boosts a stock, since index funds all buy the stocks that are in an index. So GE will lose that boost. But also, it will change the actual DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average).

The article says, “The committee that runs the Dow prefers no more than a 10-to-1 ratio between the high and low stocks in the index.”

If something purports to be a measurement, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average purports, it seems like establishing price standards is, you know, simply manipulating that measurement to get the numbers you want.

Yes, the article says that GE had little impact on the DJIA, because its stock price was so low … but isn’t that the point? It had a low stock price, and that price should affect the average as much as the high prices affect the average.

They also say that GE doesn’t represent the economy any more. That argument makes more sense. If you’re purporting to measure the economy, then changing the mix based on the economy, makes sense. I can buy into to some degree, but manufacturing DOES still exist in the US, and wouldn’t GE be our most significant representative of that sector?

What is “the economy?”

How do they decide what “represents the economy.”

Is it simply who has the most money? If so, trash the whole index of companies and simply replace it with today’s measure of the wealth of the top 10 people in the Forbes 500, or the top 10 institutions that hold the most equities.

Since the purpose of the economy is to create jobs and lift up the country as a whole, perhaps the DJIA should more heavily weight the companies according to the number of full-time, individual living-wage jobs they provide for the economy?

Or perhaps the DJIA should contain only companies that have never been involved in scandals, since surely we don’t want our economic measures to reward bad actors.

If, as the article states, the financial sector are considered one of the major (if not the major) sectors of the economy, then the financial measures they use will have broad implications for us all. If the DJIA no longer contains GE, that will certainly alter a great many actions somewhere, on some plate.

We just won’t know whose, and whether those actions are bad for the economy, or whether they give us some kind of boost. The one thing we can be fairly sure of: when you change what gets measured, you will change what gets managed.

Meetings can be the bane of our existence! A great many of them are poorly run and useless… but even the useful ones have problems.

Note taking! I take copious notes in meetings. After all, in good meetings, there’s a lot of good stuff that needs to be captured: decisions, their rationale, vendor information, and action items.

Electronics don’t do it. They’re distracting and take you away from the people dynamics—which are often the part that ultimately make or break you. You want your attention on people during a meeting; you need to spot those telltale flinches that signal potential blackmail material. It’s hard to watch the people when you’re trying to discreetly play Civilization 5 at the same time.

Paper lets you keep your attention mainly on people. And I like paper, but it can get disorganized and is hard to find stuff. My solution? A hybrid system that uses both: electronics for reference, paper notes for recording.

Create folders for each project

Give each project its own folder on a cloud service, like Adobe Document Cloud. All documents and resources related to that project goes in that folder. Make that a habit, and you just don’t have to think about it. Everything related to Project X goes in folder X.

When you need to find the secret plans related to Project X, you instantly know your go-to folder: folder X. It’s simple, and very effective if you use it rigorously.

Put background material into the folder

When there are background documents needed for a project or decision, they go in the project folder. While I may take large hardcopy documents to the meeting itself, for anything that’s only a few pages, I quickly scan it using my smartphone with a scanning app like Adobe Scan, then the PDF file goes into the project folder as background material.

Since Adobe Scan has optical character recognition of the scanned documents, it makes the PDF text searchable. When you need to find reference information quickly, rather than flipping through a stack of papers, you can simply do a quick search within the PDF.

I generally put background materials in a subfolder called REFERENCE so they don’t clutter up the main project folder.

Take notes on paper

Remember how you’re going to take notes on paper, so you can be on the lookout for the subtle interpersonal dynamics that reveal the true nature of the power hierarchy? Do it. Take the notes on paper.

When the group makes a decision, note it, and write a big exclamation point next to it. When there are action items, write them in the lower right part of the paper, with a little checkbox next to each one. Now, with a glance, you’ll be able to review your notes and find both the decisions and the action items. Consider using blank, unlined paper if you can write neatly.

Summarize and Scan, Scan, Scan

At the end of the meeting, if you have several pages of notes, you may want to copy all the decisions and action items onto a single page at the end, for quick reference.

Then … scan your notes and save as a PDF using your scanning app. You’ll end up with a single PDF that has an easy-to-use summary page, with all the details saved for the future. You can also use Adobe Acrobat to combine your PDF’s, update notes, and easily share with others on your team.

Name your files for easy retrieval.

Upload the PDF to the project folder, with a filename that starts with the word MEETING and the date in yymmdd format. For example, MEETING 180316 Marketing department.

When you sort the project folder by filename, all meeting notes will be together since they all start with MEETING. They will then be grouped in order by date.

Using a combination of electronic and paper workflow lets you keep your attention where it needs to be at any given time. You use paper when your attention needs to be on the people, and use scanning, project folders, and more to make it neat, easy, and fast to access information when you need it.

One of the most valuable distinctions you can make about language is to develop insight into active and passive voice. “Mistakes were made” is passive voice. It doesn’t say by whom those mistakes were made. People use passive voice to avoid acknowledging responsibility.

People also deflect responsibility by using words that sound like they refer to something real, but which refer to abstract concepts. Then they talk as if those abstract concepts are somehow active agents.

“Competition increased this year.” No, it didn’t. Customers purchased from other companies, instead of yours. It’s customers where the action lies. When you put the action where it belongs, you can start to gain insight into how you can investigate further. In this case, by calling up a bunch of customers buyers and asking, “why did you buy from Those Other Guys, Inc. instead of us?”

My favorite deceptive language of the day is that “wages aren’t going up as much as expected, given the economy.” But … wages don’t go up or down. Wages just are. The proper formulation is, “managers and employers are not raising wages.” That puts the action (and the responsibility) squarely where it belongs.

Learn to listen carefully to language. You’ll quickly start to realize how much people use it to avoid addressing the real problems they’re dealing with.

]]>35710Craft strategy from both inside and outsidehttps://www.steverrobbins.com/articles/craft-strategy-from-both-inside-and-outside/
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The economic playing field has gotten complicated enough that it’s foolish to step on the field without some idea of how you’re going to win. In sports, you have a playbook, which lists the plays you can make. In business, we call these “tactics.” You also need a strategy, a way to combine those plays so you win the game. While it’s possible to win without a formal strategy, having a good strategy can often give you a leg up. You’ll form the best strategy by looking both inward and outside.

For example, you may have invented an electric car that you sell to shipping companies. That’s given you expertise in creating electric cars, and you have expertise selling to shipping companies. You can grow your business by concentrating on bringing your technological expertise (electric cars) to new markets. You can also grow your business by developing new products to sell to shipping companies. In the first case, you’re organizing your strategy around your technology. In the second, you’re organizing around a particular set of customers. Which you decide to do is entirely up to you.

When I worked at Babson College in the team formulating the strategy of the school, Babson was ranked the #1 school for entrepreneurship, world-wide. This gave us an explicit decision: do we ignore the ranking, and (try to) build some other brand for the school, or do we concentrate in entrepreneurship. Babson chose to continue building on entrepreneurship. It didn’t have to, however. Making the choice explicit led to initiatives that would never have happened without that self-examination.

Look outwards to the environment

Great resources aren’t enough. You might have the biggest bank account in your industry, but if your competitor also owns your industry’s largest distributor, you’re going to get creamed. Your landscape determines which (if any) of your resources can help you win.

The most famous model for understanding the strategy landscape for crafting your business strategy is Michael Porter’s “Five Forces” model. My favorite is a later extension of Porter’s model, the “value net,” presented in the excellent book Co-opetition by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff. With a value net, you look at the world around you: competitors, substitutes, suppliers, customers, complementors, and barriers to entry. You design your strategy taking into account what each part of your value net brings to the table, and how that meshes with your business goals.

For example, your industry might be dominated by two or three suppliers. That gives the suppliers tremendous negotiating leverage, and the ability to cut you out of the market if you don’t agree to their demands. Furthermore, it makes your business vulnerable if one of the suppliers encounters a disruption, since you don’t have many alternatives.

Good business strategy sometimes happens by magic, but you don’t want to bet the farm on Tinkerbell being in the right place, at the right time. Formulate your strategy by deciding how you can best deploy your internal resources given how your industry’s value net looks today. Times change quickly these days, and an integrated approach to keeping your strategy current will keep you at the top of your game.

I know in my gut that business travel is what drives the paper industry’s profitability. Every step you take ends up producing a receipt, business card, or some important note scribbled on a napkin, in the hope it will become the Next Big Thing. Then you’re supposed to sort out this massive pile of former trees and report it. Yeah, right. Sorting expense report receipts is really high on everyone’s list of “most favorite task, ever.”

Though I often consider smartphones to be drains on productivity, taming the travel paper flow is one place they really shine. I love using “scanning apps”, like Adobe Scan to keep my travel paperwork completely sorted out from the start.

Adobe Scan takes a picture of a document, lets you crop it, and turns it into a fully searchable and editable PDF. You can organize several scans into one PDF document, and organize the PDFs into folders.

Use Scanning to Manage Your Receipts

Save your receipts throughout the day. When you get a receipt, jot down on the receipt what it was for, who you were with, and so on (which you need to do anyway). When you return to your room at the end of the day, you’ll get out all your saved receipts and super quickly deal with them once and for all.

Make a summary page. Total up the receipts into categories—how much you spent on food, how much on transportation, etc. Grab a blank piece of paper, write the date, and the summary of the categories.

Then open your scanning app, and snap a quick scan of the cover sheet with the totals, followed by the receipts. Your app will detect the pages, correct for perspective, and save it all in a PDF document. Include today’s date in the filename.

Voila! You now have a single PDF with today’s receipts already scanned and totaled, with the details noted on each receipt. If you have to fill out a separate expense report later, you’ve already done the totaling by category, and each PDF separates out a separate day. You don’t need to wait until the end of the day to scan your receipts. You can add each new receipt to your existing PDF, and then create your cover page at the end of the day and add it to the start of your file.

Adobe Scan’s optical character recognition makes your PDF searchable by any text mentioned on the receipts. This is a huge plus that you’ll appreciate later. When you need to go directly to an expense, just search for the name of the company on the receipt, and it will pop right up.

Organize by expense category. Depending on your reporting requirements, rather than organizing your scans by date, you might put all the receipts of one type into the same PDF. For example, you might want all your transportation receipts in one document, and all your meal receipts in another.

In this case, the easiest course of action is to sort your receipts as you get them, and save them up to scan them all at once. At the end of your trip, create a cover sheet with each category and its totals, and scan the cover sheet and all the receipts in that category.

Capture maps

Since you’re often in unfamiliar territory—a conference center, hotel, or corporate campus—you need to know how to get around. When you spot a map of the facility, scan it. Often the facility maps are on a wall, or printed in a book that’s inconvenient to carry around. But the filtering included in a scanning app can often give you a good-quality map even if you snap it off the hotel wall or out of a conference book.

Use Scanning for Conference Notes and Directions

You’re often traveling for meetings or learning. Doing a good job means having real engagement, with your attention focused on what’s going on around you, not on wrestling with your technology. If you take notes you’ll learn the material farbetter taking notes by hand on paper. You can keep more of your attention on whoever’s speaking, and you engage more of your brain in learning and participating. So do that! Take your notes on paper. At the top of each sheet, write a few keywords so you can glance at the top of the sheet and know what’s on it.

At the end of a session, scan your notes into a single PDF for the session. You can then pull the scanned sheets into Acrobat to annotate it as needed, adding circles, arrows, highlights, and anything else that will help pull your attention to the most important areas.

If you aren’t using a scanning app to organize your paper flow as you travel, grab one now. Tame your receipts and your business cards, so you can spend more time on substance, and less on administrivia.